Are you interested in using oceanographic satellite data in your work but don't know where to start? The NOAA CoastWatch program, in collaboration with UC Santa Cruz's Fisheries Collaborative Program, will offer a satellite course open to the UC Santa Cruz community the week of January 24-28, 2022.

Participants will learn about environmental satellite data and how to easily obtain it, and gain hands-on experience working with the data that may help their projects and application. A major goal of the course is to provide scientists who are not regular users of satellite data with the knowledge and tools they need to incorporate satellite data into their research and management projects.

The course will be led by Jennifer Sevadjian (UCSC), Cara Wilson (NOAA), and Dale Robinson (UCSC). We are using an online format where scheduled course meetings require a time investment of about one hour per day, with the option for participants to drop into daily office hours for assistance. Instruction materials will be available online for participants to complete according to their own pace and schedule. Participants are encouraged to come to the course with a specific satellite-based project to work on. There is no financial fee to attend this course. However, we do expect ‘payment’ from participants in the form of a slide due on the last day of the course describing the project they worked on in class.

Additional information and registration instructions are available on the CoastWatch West Coast Node website.

CoastWatch

NOAA CoastWatch is a national program that provides easy access for everyone to global and regional satellite data products for use in understanding, managing and protecting ocean and coastal resources and for assessing impacts of environmental change. 

CoastWatch Nodes, housed in NOAA line offices throughout the US, deliver value-added products customized for regional users, free training opportunities, online tutorials, a responsive user helpdesk, and outreach for stakeholder engagement in the development of new products, tools and services. 

Two CoastWatch nodes are part of the UC Santa Cruz Fisheries Collaborative Program: the West Coast Node, which assists users working on marine and coastal regions of the US West Coast, and the PolarWatch Node, which assists users working on Arctic and Antarctic. 

Learn more:

NOAA CoastWatch

West Coast Node

PolarWatch Node

Instructor Bios

Jennifer Sevadjian

Jennifer is the Operations Manager for PolarWatch, where she works to increase access to and usage of high-latitude ocean satellite and remote sensing data. She is a Data Systems Analyst with the UC Santa Cruz Fisheries Collaborative Program and is based out of the NOAA SouthWest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla, CA. She has a background in ocean data management, in-situ data integration and web development and has previously held ocean data related positions with the Central and Northern California Ocean Observing system (CeNCOOS), PacIOOS and NOAA CO-OPS. 

Cara Wilson

Cara Wilson is a satellite oceanographer for the Environmental Research Division at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC) and is the PI of two regional nodes of NOAA’s CoastWatch program – the West Coast Regional Node and PolarWatch, which are both housed at SWFSC. Her research interests are in using satellite data to examine bio-physical coupling in the surface ocean, with a particular focus on determining the biological and physical causes of the large chlorophyll blooms that often develop in late summer in the oligotrophic Pacific near 30°N. She received a Ph.D. in oceanography from Oregon State University in 1997, where she examined the physical dynamics of hydrothermal plumes.  After getting her PhD she worked as the InterRidge Coordinator at the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France.  Her introduction to remote sensing came with a post-doc at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center which involved analyzing TOPEX and SeaWiFS data. She is also the current chair of the IOCCG (International Ocean Colour Coordinating Group).

Dale Robinson

Dale Robinson is the Operations Manager for West Coast Node and deputy PI for the PolarWatch. He works with local stakeholders and engagement partners to develop and distribute value-added satellite products that are designed for use in operational and research activities. He is a co-investigator on a NASA-funded project to develop new ocean algorithms for satellite particulate organic carbon and a collaborator on two NOAA-funded projects to develop a suite of satellite data products localized for the Arctic. Dale is a Project Scientist with UC Santa Cruz's Fisheries Collaborative Program and is based out of the NOAA SouthWest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, CA. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California and has worked as a researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, and San Francisco State University.